Preview

I imagine most people thought it was pretty funny when Joe Biden, perhaps accidentally, perhaps on purpose, reacted thus on a hot mic to Fox’s Peter Doocy’s question about whether inflation was a good or a bad thing. I see that John McCain apparently shared a similar opinion of Doocy’s “journalism.” Doocy may or may not be a jerk in reality, but like everyone else on Fox, he plays one on TV. And therefore, it’s a good thing Biden said it out loud. He needs to keep it up.

Altercation readers do not need a rehearsal of all the ways Fox, and its imitators, are helping to destroy American democracy, the planet, and the meaning of both journalism and truth itself. Actual, professional journalists made a terrible mistake when they welcomed Fox into their fraternity and treated its lying propagandists as colleagues. True, Fox was nowhere near as bad in 1996, when it began, as it is today. But neither were Republicans, and while coincidence is not causation, this time it damn well certainly is. The Obama administration tried to isolate Fox early in its first term by refusing to send its representatives on its programs, a policy that mainstream media responded to with hissy fit after hissy fit. (I wrote about some of these recently here, and as you can see, quite a few times before that.) What it should have done, and what Biden has done, is to treat Fox as ridiculous; to make jokes about how “stupid” its questions, programs, and people are.

Of course, only some Fox people are actually stupid. Many are just cynical and pretend to be stupid, because that’s what its stupid viewers want. But the Biden treatment is a way forward. Let the Jake Tappers of the world whine; they are only insulting themselves by referring to Doocy and the rest of the Fox liars and racists as “journalists.” Who really wants to be on the side of someone like Republican Jim Banks, who says “No President ‘Has Attacked a Free Press’ More Than Biden in Bonkers Tweet”? Well, maybe a few comedians …

Speaking of the poison spewing from Fox News, Media Matters alerts us to the fact that “Tucker Carlson’s ‘Hungary vs. Soros’ Is Ham-Handed Propaganda Straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook.”

Here, from Media Matters, are just a few details of the programming from Tucker and all the “journalists” at Fox:
Conspiracy theories about Soros are a staple on the extremist right, echoing long-standing antisemitic myths about the amount of power in the hands of prominent Jews. And these conspiracy theories have already motivated antisemitic violence in the U.S. Robert Bowers, the man who killed 11 Jewish worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, regularly posted conspiracy theories about Soros. Cesar Sayoc, the man who sent pipebombs to prominent Democrats and CNN, had sent the first of his bombs to be found to Soros’ home.

Fox’s fearmongering about Soros is not limited to Carlson or his Fox Nation show. From January 1, 2021, through January 25, 2022, Fox News has mentioned “Soros” a total of 379 times, according to Media Matters’ transcript analysis of the Kinetiq video database. This coverage ramped up in the past three months, with at least 90 references to Soros on Fox so far in January. While Tucker Carlson Tonight had the most mentions by far, he’s not alone; Fox & Friends had the second most, and The Five came in third. Fox’s adoption of Soros as a civilizational boogeyman reflects the network’s steady integration of extremist ideology into its core programming.

Oh, and the next time you hear someone term MSNBC to be the liberal equivalent of Fox, you might want to note, in person if possible, that this liberal network accords a former conservative Republican congressman control over four hours of programming every day! (That and the fact that even the genuinely liberal MSNBC hosts and guests are not encouraged to lie, as well as to spew racism, hatred, antisemitism, etc., but I digress …)

Virtually all the news out of Israel and the West Bank has been awful of late. Here are a few lowlights:

Israeli Settlers Rage Through Palestinian Town, Marking the Latest ‘Nationalistically Motivated’ Attack in the Region

A 78-year-old Palestinian American man died this month from a stress-induced heart attack brought on by injuries sustained while he was detained by Israeli soldiers

Israelis Were Mostly Unbothered About NSO’s Spyware—Until It Was Reportedly Turned on Them

‘Tantura’ Director: Israelis Have Been Lied to for Years About Alleged 1948 Massacre

Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum recently had their annual New York Jewish Film Festival. I braved my virus concerns for only one evening, but one I felt I could not miss: a night of two documentaries—ones that I might never be able to see otherwise—on the authors A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. I’d been thrilled to spend a few hours with Yehoshua (and his late wife) way back when I wrote this longish piece on Israel for The Nation on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of its founding. All readers of contemporary fiction should be familiar with his work. Grossman, too, is a towering literary figure, with his books translated into 30 languages. (The documentary begins and ends with a meeting he apparently holds for every novel with all his translators. I counted about a dozen; interestingly, almost all are female.)

Together with Amos Oz, who passed away in 2018, these three authors have presented a face of Israel to the rest of the world that I, and so many others, liked to imagine as the “real” Israel, as opposed to one evident in the stories cited above. That Israel is still alive, but it grows smaller every day. I’d say that roughly, its size is akin to the circulation of Haaretz, one of the world’s great newspapers, but that’s barely more than 5 percent of its population. Most of the rest of Jewish Israelis—Arabs constitute more than 20 percent of the population—vote for right-wing parties. They’re perfectly OK with the direction the country has taken in recent years and simply ignore the horrific injustices inflicted on the Palestinians every minute of their lives. Yes, I know it’s complicated. I would not know how to make “peace” with either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority now either. One is dangerously fanatical, and the other is corrupt and discredited. But that is a separate issue from the way Israel treats both Palestinian Israelis, and more egregiously, those Palestinians living under occupation.

Grossman, who lost his son on the final day of Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006—a war he opposed—and Yehoshua represent a vision of Israel that was always something of a fantasy; these are uniquely talented writers and dedicated soldiers for peace with the Palestinians. It’s inspiring to see the latter keep going, publishing new fiction at 85, meeting with Palestinians in the West Bank. Grossman only became a novelist because he was fired from his radio job for his terrific reporting on Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, as he recounted in his 1988 book, The Yellow Wind.

But again, I am depressed. To the degree that this ever was Israel, it is no more. And the Palestinians—thanks, in part, it must be said, to their own awful, awful leadership, refusing compromise offers in 1921, 1922, 1939, 1947, as well as potentially promising offers in 1978, and especially 2000 and 2001—have never been further as they are today from getting their own country or even being allowed to live their lives in basic decency, much less democracy. Both sides were responsible for the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords, but, personally, I think neither side will ever be able to make the compromises necessary for a genuine peace, for reasons I lay out in my forthcoming (this fall), seven-years-in-the-making book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel. But that does not justify Israel’s behavior; nor does this failure take anything away from the personal courage of these two writers in keeping up the struggle.

You can watch interviews with the filmmakers of both documentaries—Yair Qedar for The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, and Adi Arbel and Arik Bernstein for Grossman—on the Film Society’s YouTube channel here, but I’d also recommend that you seek out the fiction of both writers if you have not already.

I also want to recommend a new book by my favorite literary critic Adam Kirsch. It’s called Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud. Kirsch spent seven years doing what is called “Daf Yomi,” which is the practice, undertaken by many traditionally religious Jews of reading one page of Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years. He wrote about what he read once a week online during that time, and the book comprises what I understand to be his greatest hits. In it, he manages to do something I would have thought impossible, which is to communicate the surreal weirdness of the arguments in the Talmud while simultaneously remaining respectful of its underlying seriousness. The writing is also quite clever and entertaining, which is what you’d expect if you’ve been reading Kirsch elsewhere and in his previous books.